Music Ally

Apple has laid down the law with labels considering promoting their albums through Amazon’s MP3 Daily Deal. Amazon apparently raised Apple’s ire when it asked labels for a one-day exclusive sales window on digital albums featured in its daily promotion.

“When that happened, iTunes said ‘Enough of that shit’,” one label exec tells Billboard. Another elaborates: “Amazon is fighting a guerrilla war against iTunes, and now iTunes is getting frustrated because they work hard to set up and promote a release weeks in advance of the street date, and then lo and behold, Amazon jumps in there with this deal of the day and scrapes off some of the cream.”

The article suggests some labels have already pulled planned Amazon promotions as a result of Apple’s demands.

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Read on for today’s Bulletin, and do pass this link on to any colleagues or contacts who  you think would be interested too.

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Apple unveiled its hotly-anticipated tablet device tonight in San Francisco. It’s called iPad, will start at $499, and ships to consumers in 60 days’ time.

The device has a 9.7-inch touchscreen, is 0.5 inches thick and runs what looks like a modified version of the iPhone operating system. In fact, it’s best thought of as an oversized iPhone or iPod touch.

The iPad will run almost all existing iPhone apps out of the box, although developers will also be able to modify their apps to suit the device’s larger screen. It accesses iTunes in the same way as iPhone does to buy music, and syncs with a computer via USB to transfer media and apps across.

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The Wall Street Journal is the latest august publication to print a long list of leaked info on Apple’s upcoming tablet, gleaned from its sources within the company. But right at the end, there’s something just as juicy for the music industry.

“Apple has also been planning a revamp of its iTunes music service by creating a Web-based version of it that could launch as soon as June,” claims the article. “Tentatively called iTunes.com, the service would allow customers to buy music without going through the specialized iTunes program on computers and iPhones.”

It goes on to suggest that Apple plans to ramp up its affiliate partnerships with online radio services and review sites, populating them with ‘Buy’ buttons for the new store.

Meanwhile, MP3tunes founder Michael Robertson’s claim that Apple is also working on a cloud music storage service has been bolstered by a CNET report saying the very same thing: that Apple has been talking to the four major labels about its plans to let people store copies of their iTunes music libraries on Apple’s servers.

“The benefits to an iTunes user would include the ability to back up music and access songs off the Web from any Internet-connected device and conceivably from anywhere in the world,” suggests the article. It could launch this Spring, and might even be announced at next Wednesday’s tablet launch event.

MP3tunes boss Michael Robertson is stirring again, this time digging into Apple’s likely strategy for its iTunes Store in a guest post for tech blog TechCrunch.

“Leveraging their ubiquitous iTunes software Apple plans to upgrade their users almost overnight to a cloud music service in an ambitious move to beat Amazon and others to a cloud music service,” he writes, saying that the strategy is also designed to “sidestep new licenses from the major labels”.

He predicts that recently-acquired Lala will be crucial to this strategy, NOT because of its 10-cent song streaming rental model, but for its music locker technology. “An upcoming major revision of iTunes will copy each user’s catalog to the net making it available from any browser or net connected ipod/touch/tablet.”

What, you might think, does this mean for existing music locker companies like, well, MP3tunes?

The mobile advertising market is hotting up, following Google’s announcement that it was buying mobile ad network AdMob for $750 million last November. Apple was rumoured to be in the running for that deal, but now it’s made its move by buying rival Quattro Wireless for a reported $275 million instead.

Apple hasn’t yet announced the deal, but Quattro Wireless has confirmed it. Speculation is already buzzing about what it will mean for developers of ad-supported apps for iPhone and iPod touch. Will they be forced to use Quattro’s ad units, or will they be able to continue using AdMob or other ad networks?

Music app developers will be following the fallout with interest. Approaches to mobile have so far differed. Pandora includes advertising in its iPhone app, but Spotify has opted to make its mobile apps ad-free and available to premium customers only.

2009 has seen the rise of streaming services Spotify and Pandora (and the fall of several of their rivals); governments grappling with anti-piracy legislation; The Pirate Bay trial – and then its tragicomic sale saga; and hundreds of bright-eyed music start-ups and thousands of iPhone apps. And STILL no Yellow Submarine iPod.

We rounded up the key trends from the year for our final Music Ally Report of 2009, and the article is republished below in full. If you’re interested in our service in 2010, with its daily bulletin and fortnightly analytical report, click here for a free trial.

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In the fourth part of our series looking back at the Decade of Digital (read part one on 2000, part two on 2001 and part three on 2002 published earlier this week) we examine 2003: the year that US labels started legal actions against individuals and the year that the iTunes music store launched for the PC.

Sign up for a free two-week trial to Music Ally and get access to all our past reports and bulletins plus a suite of research tools including market data, a deal tracker and an analyst forecast tracker. In the most recent PDF Report you can find a rundown of 2009’s big events plus an extensive timeline detailing the key digital music happenings of the past ten years.

And continue reading after the jump to take a look back at the year 2003, as we reported it at the time.

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The Wall Street Journal is claiming that Google was in “serious discussions” to buy Lala before Apple acquired the company last week.

The article suggests that Google has deeper ambitions in the music space than its recently-launched music search service – possibly tied into giving people a way to stream music to netbooks running its Chrome OS platform. Meanwhile, Apple was apparently interested in buying mobile advertising company AdMob before Google acquired it last month for $750 million.

The picture painted is of two companies increasingly muscling in on one another’s turf – with startups caught in the middle (although if this means bidding wars, it’s not such a bad place to be caught). The question now is whether Google will buy another music startup instead…

Since news broke that Apple was buying streaming music startup Lala, various journalists and commentators have been trying to work out how much the company paid.

All Things Digital cites multiple sources as saying the price was $80 million, but TechCrunch’s entirely separate multiple sources say it was nearer to $17 million. Both agree, however, that the deal is less about turning iTunes into a cloud-based streaming music service, and more about Lala’s personnel.

“LaLa was acquired mostly for the star engineering team and the awesome recent Google deal more than for the product,” says TechCrunch. “Lala’s real asset was its technology team: In the end, Apple bought the company to get its hands on its engineers,” agrees All Things Digital.